The Range: The Tucson Weekly's Daily Dispatch

Girls Gone Wild Goes Bankrupt, ASU Students Cry Out In Despair

Sorry, Girls Gone Wild University and Casino students, your school's title sponsor appears to be in dire financial straits.

GGW founder and really, really creepy dude Joe Francis has placed his company and its related brands under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. That's to avoid losing parts of the company's assets to resort founder Steve Wynn, as he attempts to cherry-pick them to satisfy terms of a lawsuit judgement, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal:

Wynn’s resort has been chasing Francis, 39, for years after he failed to pay a $2 million gambling debt to the hotel during a February 2007 trip. In 2012, the resort got a $7.5 million judgment for defamation “stemming from Francis’s public attack falsely accusing Wynn of deceiving customers,” according to the resort’s lawsuit.

“Such entities were not named in the domesticated judgment,” an attorney for those companies said in court papers, noting that Wynn had also asked for a receiver to take over those companies.

“Francis has effectively evaded meaningful collection by making it appear that he has virtually no income or assets, despite his publicly lavish lifestyle,” Wynn attorneys said in the lawsuit. “Wynn has confirmed what it has long suspected, namely that Francis has avoided Wynn’s collection efforts by, among other things, not taking any income and using accounts held by various entities that do business under his ‘Girls Gone Wild’ brand to pay all his personal expenses.”

So, all things considered, it looks like we may have to retire the Girls Gone Wild University and Casino moniker we've "lovingly" draped across the shoulders of our overly-tanned, sticky-with-a-mixture-of-Four-Loko-and-shame neighbors to the north. Any suggestions, folks?